TWO GARDENS
I am lucky enough to have two gardens. At home in New Jersey I grow hundreds of plants, a full compliment of weeds and a daily dose of satisfaction. My summer garden in central New York State is much smaller and less ambitious. I tend it for three weeks a year at most, but it expands a little each summer. Some years even the insect pests find the climate challenging.
My grandfather bought our summer house, with its nine, mostly wooded acres, in 1941. Now my sister and I own the property, which sits on a very long lake that reminded my grandfather of his childhood home in England’s Lake District. Though he was an engineer, not a gardener, his then-teenaged daughter, my aunt, put in a Victory Garden and a modest plot of ornamentals.
Her plants are still there, including long-lived hostas, low-growing sedum, lily-of-the-valley, brunnera and a Dorothy Perkins rambling rose that pops up at random in the u-shaped bed. I try to tidy things up at least once a year, and I think of my aunt when I do. Years ago I took cuttings from Dorothy Perkins and rooted them. The rose’s offspring have succeeded beyond all expectations in my sister’s garden as well as my own.
It’s satisfying to tend my aunt’s handiwork, but a landscape should never be static. Ten years ago I started putting my own stamp on the property. Now there are three additional beds, with more growing in my imagination.
The first bed I made is two feet wide and twelve feet long, bounded on one long side by a wall of the house, and on the other by a narrow section of the bluestone terrace. The plot is filled with several species of pink and blue-purple-flowered hardy geranium or cranesbill. A rambunctious patch of lemon mint dominates the middle, engaged in a pitched battle with a healthy clump of tall, yellow and orange-flowered helenium. I like the helenium better than the mint, so each year I yank out some of the latter. The mint regards this as a sign of affection and redoubles its growth efforts. A tenacious red mini rose that my daughter picked it out at the supermarket when she was about ten sits on the north end of this bed. I warned her that it probably wouldn’t survive the winter, but she insisted that we plant it in the garden. Eight years later this ten inch tall rose has gotten through flood, drought and sub-freezing temperatures, and continues to bloom, protected on one side by a lavender and on the other by a newly-installed Russian sage.
Five years ago we had major restoration work done on the rear of the house, which backs up to a steep embankment. The excavation required to replace a massive retaining wall left us with a steep embankment composed of about seventy-five percent rocks and twenty-five percent soil, hardened into a concrete consistency. Large scale erosion was a real danger, so my sister and I decided that the best way to keep the soil in place was to get something growing in it as soon as possible.
We chose daylilies because they are tough and beautiful, with fibrous roots that hold the soil. Obtaining some specimens from garden centers, we also transplanted common tawny orange daylilies from elsewhere on the property. We literally chiseled out the planting holes, filled them with lily tubers and compost and hoped for the best. I also put in a red-berried cotoneaster at the bottom of the slope and a double-flowered rose of Sharon shrub in the middle.
Now the lilies completely cover the embankment, which in July looks like an orange cascade. I have to remove a few of the tawny daylilies every year to keep them from overwhelming their well-bred, domesticated relatives, as well as the two shrubs. Needless to say, we have no more erosion issues.
My newest garden bed is on the edge of our shale beach, and it is now about eight feet long. It faces south and is bounded by the nearly buried remnants of an old concrete crib dock. The beach supports a number of weeds, so I knew it could also support ornamentals. I chose drought-tolerant plants because the soil, such as it is, drains like a large-holed sieve. Each time a new plant goes in, I line the planting hole with a page of newspaper to slow the drainage until the plant has had a chance to set sturdy roots. This method has proved successful so far with yellow-flowered potentilla, a clump of coreopsis, a lavender, some low-growing campanula and a few daylilies. I have high hopes for the tall, black-leafed sedum and the Rosa hugonis or Father Hugo’s rose that I installed this summer. Like all my central New York plants, the specimens in the beach bed are cold hardy and able to withstand extreme winter temperatures.
So why go to the trouble of having a garden that I only see three weeks a year and have to weed and water like any other plot? Because it isn’t trouble. Gardening is a vocation and a vacation rolled into one satisfying package. It is also one of the best forms of relaxation. And isn’t that what vacations are for?